Renaissance doesn’t rise to the heights of more personal records like Beyoncé and Lemonade, but it’s complex deep house influence still makes a persuasive case for the…
There’s one very well-executed scene in mainland Chinese indie director Geng Jun’s Manchurian Tiger: Ma Qianli (Jun regular Zhang Zhiyong), a one-time-successful real estate mogul…
A Beautiful Time is as rich an emotional experience as it is a masterful work of craftsmanship. Truly great Willie Nelson albums come in many different shapes, sizes,…
Black Medusa is cast with a certain austere beauty, but is an otherwise empty exercise in bland, utilitarian form. In a thankless role as one of…
#18. Rare is the artist in popular music with a sound that’s entirely their own; one-time Fleetwood Mac mastermind Lindsey Buckingham is for sure one of…
#24. Siberia flaunts Abel Ferrara’s enthralling and fearless devotion to a uniquely dynamic (and specifically filmic) form of psychological expressionism — an approach that is still…
Being the Ricardos would have benefitted from more fully committing to one of its many directions, but it remains a slick, emotionally dynamic film and further…
Blue Bannisters is first Lana album in a while that isn’t exactly doing its own thing but it still presents occasional pleasures, even if it pales…
Try Harder! submits itself to a certain festival-friendly documentary texture rather than acting as a probing reflection of its sociopolitical environment. One of the many tensions…
What’s more hip than mimicking the particular, diffuse, long-take formalism favored by many of the most acclaimed filmmakers in Asia today? How about having your…
The Boy from Medellín’s early commitment to emotional and psychological honesty is ultimately subsumed by the doc’s refusal to engage on any political level. With…
Cliff Walkers is a visually slick and violent spy flick that avoids propaganda and imbues its proceedings with considerable emotional and existential weight. Don’t let a…
Imagine that your cousin steals your laptop (the dirty motherfucker), finds a rough draft of a project you’ve long given up on, and submits it…
Think Spotlight but shot by Yu Lik-wai, Jia Zhang-ke’s favorite DP. Sounds pretty neat, right? And for a while, The Best Is Yet to Come…
Miss Anthropocene is the type of pop eccentricity that only an artist like Grimes could conceive of. Not since Bjork’s 1997 watershed Homogenic has a weird pop artist…
Like numerous other films from Mainland China this year, Derek Tsang’s Better Days has traveled a troubled path from production to the screen: It was…
With U.S.-China tensions at the center of so much of our discourse, it seems as good a time as any to look at a figure…
Cui Jian’s music paints pictures: “A Piece of Red Cloth,” an anthemic song that Cui performed during the Tiananmen protests, instantly summons images of the…
If there’s any one quality that defines Cui Jian, it’s that he has never been content to be any one thing. Rock ‘n’ roll didn’t…
Sometime during the tour behind 1994’s Balls Under the Red Flag, Cui Jian started employing the title of his most recent album as the name…
By the mid-1990s, the political ambitions of what is known as the liumang generation — literally, “hooligans” — had devolved from a battle cry into…